


Joy to the World (You Are My Joy)

by dollylux



Series: Fic Advent Calendar 2014: Brothers, Soulmates, and Other Such Sexiness [2]
Category: Supernatural RPF
Genre: Alternate Universe, Black Friday, Christmas Fluff, Daddy Jared, First Meetings, Grumpy Jensen, Kid Fic, M/M, Protests, Walmart
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-12-02
Updated: 2014-12-02
Packaged: 2018-02-27 22:05:14
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,521
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/2708384
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/dollylux/pseuds/dollylux
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Jensen's attendance of a protest at Walmart on Black Friday is interrupted by a little girl who has lost her daddy. (Kidfic!)</p>
            </blockquote>





	Joy to the World (You Are My Joy)

**Author's Note:**

> Day two of my fic advent calendar. Prompt: commercialism.

“Daddy!”

It’s fucking freezing at 6am outside the Walmart here in Terre Haute, Indiana, but Jensen is adamant about staying, about keeping put until the last of the protestors leave. He’s wearing thermal underwear under his jeans and three layers of shirts and coats on top of his hat and gloves. He’s shivering all over as the snow continues to fall, and his hands tremble around the sign he’s holding up:

Walmart: Pay workers enough to feed a family!

“Daddy! Daddy!”

That is not a happy-kid sound. Jensen tightens his hands on the sign and looks around at the gathering of about two hundred people, trying to find the owner of the tearful, increasingly panicked kid voice.

He sees her about twenty feet away, standing near the entrance to the Evil Store. She’s wearing a pink coat and purple mittens, her hair in a braid that is falling apart, and there are tears streaking her cold, pink face. She can’t be more than six, and her crying reaches Jensen’s ears over the raised voices of the protestors.

How can all these people be ignoring this little girl? Why isn’t anyone doing anything? Where the hell is her father?!

“Daddy, please!” The little girl covers her face with her mittened hands and sobs into the knit, and Jensen’s heart constricts.

“Goddamnit,” he whispers.

Probably belongs to one of the greedy shoppers inside. Her dad is probably a guy who’s loading up his cart with HDTVs and computers, not giving a shit that his daughter is lost and terrified and could possibly be snatched up by a fucking creep on Black Friday before dawn.

Asshole.

He lowers his sign and makes his way hesitantly toward the girl, still looking around for someone, anybody with more maternal instincts than he has who might help her before Jensen gets to her.

No such luck.

“Uh. Hey.” 

He comes to a stop near her, hands clutched together almost nervously on his sign. She lifts her face and he’s almost startled by her eyes, by how bright and fearful they are, glittering with tears and a strange color, like they’re blue and green and brown all at once, like they can’t decide and so they just didn’t. She has a sweet face, and he can’t help but soften a little in the face of how lost she looks.

He crouches down in front of her like he does with his nephews, his voice gentling when he speaks to her again.

“Did you lose your Daddy, hon?”

“Yes!” Another sob, this one painful-sounding, like she’d been holding it in. She throws her arms around Jensen’s neck and clings to him, snot and tears smearing on his neck and his grey peacoat. He closes his eyes and accepts it with a sigh. “We were in the toys and I tuwned awound and he wasn’t there! I can’t find him!”

She starts crying in earnest now, probably just relieved that somebody noticed her at all. He props his sign up against the trash can next to them and wraps his arms around her tiny body, pulling her in even though she’s warmer than he is, isn’t covered in snow and can probably feel her face. Lucky.

“Shh, it’s okay. Hey, shhh. It’s okay. We’ll find him, won’t we? It’s not like he’d leave without you, right?” 

“I don’t think so.” She sounds dubiously thoughtful, but she lifts her face from his neck and looks around, surveying the protesters behind Jensen. “Are you one of the people from out here? Who don’t like Chwistmas?”

Jensen rolls his eyes, jaw tensing but he doesn’t let her go because he’s a big stupid softie. “I don’t hate Christmas! I hate big box stores like your precious Walmart here that treat their employees like sh--like poop and who manipulate people with ‘sales’--which are actually just prices slightly lowered from the jacked-up prices they charge all year, by the way--and get them to come out at obscene times of day in droves that become mindless, creepy, _Lord of the Flies_ esque mobs who resort to violence disconcertingly fast.”

The girl blinks at him for a long moment when he pauses to take a breath, her head tipping to the side.

“What did you ask Santa for for Chwistmas?”

Jensen sighs.

“C’mon. Let’s go into this hellhole and find your Dad.” He’s slow standing up, his knees aching when he tries to straighten them, his old baseball injury coming back to bite him in the ass like it does every winter. He reaches down for her hand and is pleased when she doesn’t protest, just slides her mitten against his glove and wipes her nose on her sleeve, tears still clinging to her eyelashes, but at least she’s stopped crying.

They step through the automatic doors, the blast of heat right when they cross the threshold feeling more amazing than Jensen will ever admit. He glares around at the insane crowds of people and the fluorescent lighting and the goddamn smiley faces on every sign. He grits his teeth.

“Okay, so, uh. Um. What’s your name?”

“Buckwee.” She’s leading them into the store, past the little cart room and straight between the clothes and the produce, weaving through people in a way that tells Jensen she usually shops with someone who is in a hurry.

“Buckley? Your parents named you Buckley?” Jesus. What the fuck is wrong with people?

“After Jeff Buckwee. Why? What’s your name?” She stops so fast that Jensen almost runs into her, and he turns to glare at the woman who hits the back of his heels with her shopping cart. He will admit that it feels amazing in here, his face thawing out, the snow melting on his hat and his coat and falling to the floor in puddles that will probably make someone fall later and let them sue Walmart for a few million. Good for them.

Jensen shifts from one foot to the other, a little less confident when he remembers how kind of heinous his own name is. He avoids Buckley’s multi-colored eyes and focuses instead on a display of dog Christmas shirts and Santa hats with places cut into them for the fucking dog’s ears. 

“J-uh. Jensen.”

He dares to glance down at her and he’s somehow not surprised to find her eyes narrowed on him. He has the sense to look sheepish before he clears his throat and soldiers on, tugging her along beside him until she hurries to catch up.

“So, y’all were in toys, huh?”

Buckley giggles, and Jensen looks down at her with raised eyebrows. “What’s so funny?”

“My daddy says ‘y’all” all the time. He’s fwom Texas.”

“Hm.” He doesn’t tell her that he’s from Texas, too, that he moved away because of their archaic views on homosexuals and their unbearably hot summers, that he ended up here in Terre Haute after following a boyfriend from New York City. The boyfriend didn’t last, but Jensen got a job meantime at North Vigo High as the guidance counselor, the job he’d gone to school for but definitely not in the town he’d hope to settle in.

But three years later, here he is. His nuts frozen, running on three hours of sleep, hand in hand with a little girl named after a dead musician in search of another Texan, one who probably hates gays and loves guns.

“Maybe we should look in the ammo section then.” It’s a joke, of course, one that he expected to go over the kid’s head, but she turns to glare at him. 

“My daddy hates guns. He doesn’t wike viowence.”

“Oh. Sorry, I was just, um. Oh, look! Toys!” He pulls her desperately toward the explosion of pink and dolls a few aisle ahead of them, looking for a guy in flannel or camo with a pot belly. He sees nothing but mothers and gaggles of kids, shopping cart after shopping cart filling the aisles, barely leaving room for the people crunched in between them.

“I don’t see him,” Buckley says after a few minutes of them walking back and forth and peering down each aisle, her chin trembling, tears threatening to fall again. Jensen gives her hand a squeeze and a playful swing, heading toward the men’s clothes just in case he stopped off for a Duck Dynasty shirt.

“Do you know what else he was shopping for? Can you remember?”

“He was here for--” She stops speaking suddenly when a woman with a cart comes barreling out of the sock aisle and almost straight into Buckley. Jensen gasps, all of his previously dormant (and non existent, if you ask Jensen) paternal instincts kicking in as he reaches down and snatches Buckley up off the ground, holding her on his hip and reaching a hand out lightning-fast to clamp down on the woman’s shopping cart before she can just keep rushing past them.

“HEY.” Jensen levels the woman with his eyes, a middle-aged woman with a cart full of cases of Diet Coke and what looks like twenty boxes of gluten-free cookies and a mountain of beach towels with wild eyes and her messy hair pulled back in a bun. She finally meets his eyes after she stops scanning the prices on the display behind him, her thin top lip curling into a sneer.

“What’s your problem?” She jerks her cart away from his grip and steps closer to him, like she’s going to fight him. _Like she’s going to fucking fight him and she doesn’t even know why yet._

“My problem?! You almost ran over a five-year-old!”

“I’ll be six in Januawy,” Buckley informs them helpfully from Jensen’s hip, her fingers tickling over his skull cap.

“Well, why don’t you get your damn kid out of the way?! This is no place to have a kid!”

“Walmart? Yeah, you know what? You’re right. Kids are too fucking smart to come here of their own volition. They’re dragged here by greedy parents who don’t care that they’re subjecting their children to mindless, rabid people out buying twenty copies of _Uncle Buck_ on DVD for a dollar at five in the morning!” He pushes her cart away completely, watching with satisfaction as it drives right into a display of _Frozen_ dolls.

“Listen, you stuck-up prick, you don’t--”

“DADDY!”

Everything stops when that word gets shouted right into Jensen’s ear. He turns completely in the direct that Buckley is now desperately reaching, forgetting the stupid woman and her Diet Coke and murdercart because the man walking towards them looks like someone who walks up during Lifetime movies, someone whose smile sparkles and whose hair blows in an invisible breeze at the perfect moment and who changes and saves lives with his perfect cock.

“That’s your _daddy_?” He keeps his voice soft as the man gets closer and closer, his long hair pulled back in a little ponytail at the base of his neck, his face flushed and upset, his eyes on the girl in Jensen’s arms. Buckley jumps on him the second he’s close enough, leaps straight from Jensen to her dad, and he catches her easily, draws her right up against his chest and buries his face in her hair.

“Buckley, ohmygod. Ohmygod, I was so scared. I c-couldn’t find you, baby girl, I’m so sorry. I was so scared. Are you okay?”

Buckley just nods against her father’s neck, crying again, and Jensen deflates a little, tugging his gloves off and stuffing them in his pockets so he can rub his hands over his tired face.

“Jensen found me. We were wooking for you and I couldn’t find you! Daddy, don’t weave me again. Pwease don’t weave me again.” Her arms tighten around her father’s neck in a way that’s probably strangling him, but he just takes it and squeezes her tighter right back, finally, finally looking over at Jensen, his eyes the exact same color as Buckley’s and just as filmed with tears.

“I’m, uh. I’m Jensen. That’s me.” Jensen gives an awkward little wave and lowers his gaze as he pushes his hands into his pockets, uncomfortable now that he’s not holding a sign or a hand or a child. The man catches and searches Jensen’s eyes for a long moment, his expression unreadable until he finally sticks his hand out toward Jensen.

“Jared Padalecki. Thank you so much for finding her. I was going out of my fucking mind. Losing her in this madhouse on today of all days. I didn’t know what to do.”

Jensen frowns, about to shake Jared’s hand but he doesn’t now that he’s remembered why he’s here in the first place. He folds his arms over his chest and pulls on his most disdainful expression.

“You shouldn’t even be here in the first place. This place is horrible to their employees and everything that is wrong with America. How do you not see that?” 

Jared’s face falls, his shoulders drawing in a little. He lifts the hand that he offered to Jensen and pushes it into his hair, tucking a thick lock that had fallen out of the ponytail. Jensen sees for the first time how exhausted he looks, how scruffy and (really, really sexily) disheveled, wearing a black peacoat a little longer than Jensen’s grey one, one that is worn at the elbows and has seen better days. Jensen feels bad immediately, has to literally bite down on his tongue to keep from apologizing.

“It is,” Jared finally sighs, hefting Buckley up higher onto his hip, his eyes still lowered. “It is. I know that. It’s just… this is the first Christmas since my divorce, and I’m just kind of flying blind here. Buckley and I sponsored a family last Christmas, and we bought all of their presents and gave money to buy their Christmas dinner, you know? And she wanted to do it this year, but it’s kinda hard because I’ve been working double shifts down at the hospital, and she’s going back to her mom’s at noon. I won’t have her again before the deadline for all the gifts. She really wanted to do the shopping together, and right now is kind of the only time we had to do it. I go into work later. I just…”

Jared swallows, lifting his shoulders in a shrug when he finally meets Jensen’s eyes again, his entire expression defeated instead of relieved like he was just minutes ago.

“I’m just trying to do the best I can.”

It’s Jensen who lowers his gaze this time, and he feels about two fucking feet tall. 

“Jesus,” he mumbles. “I’m. Shit, I’m sorry. I didn’t mean to make you feel. I-I mean. I had no idea that… I didn’t--”

“No, listen,” Jared interrupts, hand lifted in a truce. “I think maybe our hearts are both in the right place. And look, you saved my little girl from a stampede and almost got into a fist-fight with a retiree for her, so let’s just call it even, okay?”

Jensen laughs, smiling for the first time since he got off the phone with his sister yesterday when he’d called to wish her a happy Thanksgiving. He looks up at Jared through his lashes and can’t help it if he looks a little flirty, if he’s testing the waters a bit when he offers him his hand to shake.

“Deal.”

Jared’s hand closes around his own, big and warm and complete, and Jensen has to bite into his bottom lip to keep from whimpering. They stare right at each other while they shake hands for a little too long, and it’s Buckley who snaps them both out of it.

“Daddy, I’m hungwy. Can we get bweakfast?” 

Jared blinks, sucking in a sharp breath and turning his eyes down to Buckley, his expression immediately more focused and innocent. “Uh, sure. Yeah, we can do that. I can come get some clothes another day. We got all the toys, didn’t we? For, what were their names? Lydia and Johnny?”

“Yes!” Buckley wriggles in his arms, and Jared seems to know that’s a cue for Buckley wanting to be put down. She slides to her feet, and Jensen takes a worried step toward her, eyes darting around on the lookout for any more psycho-shoppers. Jared watches him with a little smile on his face, reaching down to gather Buckley’s tiny hand in his own.

“So, Jensen. Would you like to go to IHOP with us before I have to take her home and go to work? They have pumpkin cheesecake pancakes and decent coffee. My treat?” They make their way over to a cart loaded down with toys that Jared takes a hold of, and Jensen reaches down on instinct to grab Buckley’s hand so Jared can control the cart.

“Yeah, that sounds…” Like a dream? Like the best idea ever? Like the start of something amazing? “That sounds fantastic.”

They walk slowly toward the front where the registers are and get in a line that Buckley deems as the shortest, Jared and Jensen standing probably too close together under the guise of keeping their little group contained and safe. Jensen glances over to find Jared looking at him, and he blushes a bit, the heat spreading out on his cheeks as he grins down at his feet.

He feels warm all over, the cold from only twenty minutes before completely forgotten. 

 

\---

 

“Buckley, c’mon!”

“Babe, you’re gonna have to go get her. It’s okay. I’ll get our hot chocolate. You want whipped cream, right?” Jared pulls out his wallet and lifts his eyes to Jensen, waiting for an answer with a little smile on his face. 

Jensen groans, bottom lip tugging down into a pout. “You know I can’t have whipped cream. I got too pudgy after Thanksgiving. I’m trying to be good.”

“You’re always good,” Jared replies, his voice low and heated before he leans forward and catches Jensen’s pretty pouting mouth in a kiss. “Go on before I pull you into the bathroom and have my way with you.”

Jensen is grinning like an idiot but he pulls away from his boyfriend, letting him go into Gingersnaps while he turns around and shuffles back across the snowy sidewalk to kneel beside the girl that he quietly considers his daughter now. She’s petting a pitbull mix puppy who is sitting very still, being so good as she scritches behind his ear. 

Buckley is so tall now at almost seven, she’s so fucking smart in ways that Jensen knows means Jared has taught her well, raised her well. And Jensen may be a little biased, but he’s pretty sure that Jared is the best father on the entire planet.

“Jensen, can we get a puppy?”

Jensen groans, glancing up at the puppy’s owner and sharing a patient smile with her before he reaches over to rub Buckley’s back.

“I don’t know, Buck. Puppies are a lot of responsibility. We’ll talk to your dad, okay? It’s up to him.”

Buckley sighs, giving the puppy another few good pats before she turns away from him, reaching out automatically for Jensen’s hand. He takes it and leads her into the warm coffeeshop, heading straight for Jared.

“Heads-up: Buckley now officially has puppy fever,” Jensen whispers against Jared’s ear before he kisses the lobe of it, sliding in against Jared’s side when he feels Jared’s arm wrap around his waist. 

“Maybe we can volunteer at the shelter for a few weeks to get her ready for actually having a dog.” Jared hands over his card to the barista and hands Buckley a few dollars to put into the tip jar.

“You’re such a softie. If you think I’m getting up in the middle of the night to let the thing out to pee, you’ve got another thing comin’.” Jensen tries to sound as grumpy as possible but he’s already letting his imagination run with it: Jared conked out on the couch with the puppy draped over him, taking it for walks in the park and people cooing and going gooey over the sight of two men pathetically in love with each other walking the world’s cutest dog, Buckley trying to give the dog a bath in the backyard with doggie shampoo and the the water hose.

Damnit.

Jared is watching him all the while with a knowing smile, chilly fingers slipping under Jensen’s sweater to rub at his hip. “Love you.”

Jensen sighs, a smile pulling helplessly at his lips. He breathes the words right back against Jared’s mouth before he kisses him.

Jensen didn’t attend any protests this Black Friday. He got up, sucked his boyfriend’s dick as a good morning/happy anniversary, made omelets, and bundled Buckley up so they could all go ice skating. They have an evening planned of making chilli and watching Christmas cartoons from Jared and Jensen’s childhood, and probably now of looking up puppy names on the internet before they send Buckley to bed and get down to really celebrating their anniversary.

He doesn’t hate Black Friday so much anymore.


End file.
